With a Little Help from Her Friends

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A few years later she did take up the fiddle, and her band, the Woodchoppers, sometimes features four fiddlers in the front line—Sharon and her sister, Mary, plus another sisterhood of the strings, Yvonne and Liz Kane, as heard here on the traditional tune "Northern Lights."

Almost from the beginning Shannon was called up on stage to play local shows, and she slowly built a following throughout western Ireland, the heartland of traditional music. By 1989, at age 20, she was ready to tackle her first album and decided to do live tracks at a popular hotel pub. It happened that the Waterboys were staying at the hotel while they were doing some recording, and when they heard Shannon, they asked her to join them on a concert tour beginning the next week. "It was an amazing experience," she says. "I had only played in small pubs in the west of Ireland and suddenly I was up there on rock stages."

She stayed with the band until they broke up a year and a half later and then returned to Ireland to finish her recording project, which appeared in the United States as Sharon Shannon in a 1993 Philo disc. She followed it up with Out the Gap, in 1995. Both albums offer hearty servings of traditional Irish fare with some Quebecois, Nordic, and Cajun seasoning thrown in.

She credits living in Galway, which has recently become a hangout for musicians from around the world, as an important influence on her playing. "I've never been to New Orleans, but I think Galway is alive with music the same way," she says. "It's constant music all night every night." Steve Earle and John Prine both spend part of the year there, which is how Shannon met them. Earle coaxed her to work with him on "Galway Girl" (it also appears on his recent Transcendental Blues album), which became the inspiration for The Diamond Mountain Sessions.

"Sharon Shannon is the embodiment of pure joy in music playing," Earle raves. "She's a great player and totally fearless."

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